The Big Scare…

I know this will make three blog posts in one day, but I suppose with me it’s feast or famine.  But I read something today that really struck a chord with me.

 ”The Big Scare” is the blog post I’ve been trying to write for the last week, but just haven’t found the words.  And then, today, I read a blogpost at Let Them Eat Pro-SM Safe Spaces, which is itself a comment on a post at Alas, a Blog .  And both of the posts basically got me to the level of introspection I needed to write about “The Big Scare.”

 I’ve had sexualized submission thoughts since I was six or seven. I can clearly remember having a dream about a girl at my school using “hypnotic lipstick” to make me do her bidding, and I remember feeling funny and ashamed and simultaneously hating the idea and loving it, wanting some girl to kiss me and make me her slave and thinking, “Huh?  What’s this about?”  When I was 10, a neighbor girl tried to “hypnotize” me, and as she talked about putting me under her “power,” and I remember having the biggest hard-on of my young life.  I remember being incredibly hot because of that, almost dizzy with what was going on.  I let her do it and was erect the entire time the hypnosis session went on.  (I didn’t go under, of course.)  For some reason, I think I’m just hardwired to want to be under somebody’s control. 

 But at the same time, I have resisted being under somebody’s power.  Before even the sexualized submission fantasies, I remember an intense aversion to being a member of a group to answering to a superior. I hated the idea.  When the whole school sat up for singalongs, in my head I thought, “If I sing along, I’ll be just like them.”  I didn’t join clubs, I was uncomfortable in groups, and basically, until I got to high school, avoided any kind of social clique outside of a smallish social circle.  I was happy, I was liked well enough, but I had a pathological need to avoid being controlled or part of the crowd. 

 I do not think the instinctive urge to avoid being part of a group and the sexual longing to be dominated are unrelated — I rather suspect they feed right the hell into each other, because nothing is as attractive as that which we forbid ourselves.

 So for the two decades since I hit puberty, I’ve avoided the thought of dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.  I either made fun of those ideas and the trappings of the lifestyle when I encountered them, or was profoundly, deeply, massively creeped out.  At 17, while going through a friend’s parent’s closet looking to borrow their new rollerblades, we discovered their floggers and bondage equipment.  And because my friend’s parents were computer geeks back before that had any kind of cachet at all, we made fun of them.  It was funny — these goofy, happy, fun nerds whipping each other.  (In my head, though, I remember thinking, ‘Holy shit, I hope it’s her whipping him.’)  Attracted, but repelled.

There were a couple of fumbling experiments with letting a couple girlfriends dominate me in college, neither of which worked out because none of us had the language to express what we wanted, and because all of us were, in our hearts, subs.  (Both girls got involved in D/s relationships later, both as submissives.  No wonder it didn’t work out how I wanted.)

And then a year ago, a (now former) friend admitted to me she was into BDSM.  And I made my usual jokes, and I laughed uncomfortably, and the next day I admitted to her that, “Holy shit, I’m so submissive it hurts.  And I’ve been this way as long as I can remember.”  And admitting that to her was freeing, but frightening — and here’s where the Big Scare comes in:

As fun and wild and outrageous as I am in my real life, I was kind of vanilla.  I’m a bent, twisted vanilla — vanilla with a stripe of caramel, if you will — but still, there’s a lot of white ice cream there. And for me, admitting I’m submissive meant facing up to the face of BDSM I’d built for myself, and that was the kind of abusive relationships that the post at “Alas, A Blog” talks about.  Abuse disguised as BDSM.  The Gimp from “Pulp Fiction.”  The book “The Perfect Victim” (which I discovered because of the kindly old lady who worked at a gas station with me, and from the Blake Babies’ song “Girl in a Box.”)  The kind of hardcore gay leather scene out of the movie “Cruising.”  All of those serial killers out there with the bondage pics in their lairs and the torture vans.  (Yes, I know that’s not the real BDSM scene, and it never has been.  I know the scene is made up more of my friend’s happy parents than it is creepy victimizers, but this is what I’d locked onto in my psyche.)

For me, admitting I was a submissive forced me to face these images.  For me, admitting I was submissive made me ask, “Do I want to be a victim?  Is that what all this is about?”  And the Internet didn’t help — so much male submission fiction is tied into cuckoldry, or humiliation.  And the thing is, I don’t want to be humiliated (much. ) Certainly not about the size of my penis, which I’m actually happy with, or letting my wife sleep with other men.  I don’t want to be weak and victimized.  I want to be aggressive and strong and my own man, and submit because I allow myself to submit, to willingly give myself over to someone I trust to take total control.  If the social-anxiety that makes me resist joining a group is some kind of guard I have up, the desire to submit is the wish to drop that guard and allow one person — my Mistress, whatever the heck that means – to take control of me.  I want my submission to be a gift to whoever gets it, I want them to know that I don’t submit to just anyone — just someone stronger than me whom I trust.  For me, submission is a sign of love and loyalty, it’s got nothing to do with me being weak or some weird genderfuck hang-up about inherent superiority of one sex over another.  Hell, in a weird way, my submission is about my strength — my ability to allow someone to hurt me or dominate me a sign that I’m strong enough to take the pain and together enough to allow someone to violate every masculine taboo with me.

But that wasn’t a life I thought I could get through until I started digging.  I thought the male submissive archetype was The Gimp, that submission meant losing your personhood, being kept in a box somewhere, losing your voice.  My view of BDSM was a Law & Order SVU episode, not what the reality is.  My view was the dark stereotype.  The Big Scare for me was facing the possibility that I had these urges and they might lead to a bad place, and still soldiering on to see what I could salvage.

Now, I know The Big Scare is a lie.  The urges I had, which are (mostly) healthy and sane and incredibly sexy, were not going to lead me to giving up my job and paying some pro-domme to put out cigarettes on me while telling me what a piece of shit I am, and it’s certainly not The Gimp.  The submissive drive I feel, to give up thought and control and let somebody else drive, and control, and to even open up enough to let them hurt me, could be healthy and not exploitative and not creepy.  (Or, at least not for us.)

It’s one reason I’m so impressed by my wife, because I spent six months struggling with The Big Scare.  Six months between when I admitted I was submissive to my friend, and when I was capable of really letting my wife know what I wanted.  And she didn’t have a Big Scare of her own — she folded right into it.  BDSM is really natural for her.  For me, I’ve spent a lifetime in a love-hate relationship with my own submissiveness, and then half a year wondering if that submissiveness inevitably would lead to some weird, unwanted outcome. 

Of course, coming out and letting myself be dominated has been a happy thing — it’s been a bit of a celebration.  And the people I’ve met online have been nothing but awesome and friendly and pretty well balanced.  More than that, they’ve been supportive and helpful as I try to figure this out.  I’m sure the freaks are out there — I’m sure there is a lot of abuse masquerading as BDSM, I’m sure a lot of power-dynamics get fucked up, and I’m sure my positive outcome may be directly related to the fact that I’m a male getting into femdom with my wife of ten years rather than a woman getting into BDSM with some possibly abusive stranger.  But I’m much happier carving out my own little territory in the field than dwelling on all of the craziness I thought BDSM was about. 

So, the Big Scare’s over.  But it was touch and go for a while.